There seems to be a bit of soul-searching hitting the book blogs about the social relevance and political importance of literary writing. Some selections below, in no particular order.
“I reject the idea that a writer should write without concern for the culture. And that goes double for white, middle-class male writers. ” —At Hayden’s Ferry Review, Alan Stewart Carl (via)
“It’s easy to say, I only have a responsibility to myself as a writer but I wonder if that could ever be true. I think, again, about what Alan Stewart Carl wrote, how “writing towards the outside world seems like a good way to proceed forward.” I’m not sure how to write toward the outside world but I suspect I might be trying even when I don’t recognize the effort in myself.” — Roxane Gay responds at GIANT.
And then there’s a thread about the happenings in Egypt, also at GIANT, in which Lily Hoang asks why writers are saying so little on the topic: “On writing blogs and other social networking sites, almost nothing is being said about (Egypt), at least from the writers. It leads me to think that many writers develop an apolitical stance, a focus on aesthetics as politic rather than politics as politic.”
And from today’s Daily Rumpus email, “But what I think HTMLGIANT is talking about, at least tangentially, has something to do with the internet. Why isn’t everybody writing about what’s happening in Egypt RIGHT NOW? There’s no time to get up to speed, to fasten your observations to fact. The internet has changed our expectations, illuminated our thirst for opinions, and rights to them.”
And finally, Mark Athitakis points us to this 1996 Richard Price Paris Review interview, and the whole thing is pretty amazing. Here, he was discussing a student in one of his classes who was writing terrible stories about “black guys in the south bronx who were on Angel Dust.”
“He turned out to be one of these kids in the early eighties who was bombing trains with graffiti—one of these guys who was part of the whole train-signing subculture, you know, Turk 182. He wrote a story, over a hundred pages long, about what it was like to be one of these guys—fifteen pages alone on how to steal aerosol cans from hardware stores…who would know that stuff except somebody who really knew? And it was great. The guy was bringing in the news.”
